The male student faced "tremendous consequences" to his reputation and status at Notre Dame, the prosecutor said. He is now enrolled at a different university. The woman, meanwhile, graduated last December.

"I think if you talked to (the woman) today, she would still say she doesn't remember it," Dvorak said. "The young woman believed she was raped, whether she still believes she was raped, I don't know."

The Tribune typically doesn't name accusers in sex crime cases, and is not naming the accused man because the charges against him were dismissed and the case was permanently deleted from his record.

Neither party responded to Tribune requests for comment.

The incident

On Feb. 23, 2009, the rector of Knott Hall, a men's residence hall, found a woman wearing only a T-shirt sleeping on his living room floor at 4 a.m. The woman had no recollection of where she was, how she had gotten there or why she ended up wearing only a T-shirt. The shirt had the name of the male student on it.

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When police questioned the male student, he said they had "hooked up" and had sex.

But the woman, who police said had a blood-alcohol level of 0.13 percent, told police she didn't remember much about the evening, only that she had been drinking in a dorm room and at an off-campus "swim house" party, according to court documents.

When police asked if she remembered having sex with the male student, she said she would never have consented to have sex with him and they were only acquaintances, according to court documents.

Six months later, on Aug. 19, the suspect was formally charged with felony rape, and was arrested on campus Aug. 20. Prosecutors alleged he had sex with the woman when she was incapable of consenting.

If convicted, he would face between 20 and 50 years in prison.

He remained silent as the investigation continued, declining to talk to investigators as they prepared for trial, Dvorak said.

"Our job is always to do justice," Dvorak said. "We went forward with the evidence we thought was sufficient to convict beyond a reasonable doubt."

Then, in April 2010, two weeks before trial, the man changed his mind.

He gave a statement to prosecutors, and the case took an abrupt turn.

New evidence

"We laid out our case to him," Dvorak said. "As to what we had, what the evidence was, that we believed showed it was without consent, by and large due to her level of intoxication."

The student responded with a statement, which turned out to be more like a bombshell.

He recalled the woman telling him that night that he needed to use a condom, and telling him something else that, it turned out, she had never told anyone before.

"She had never said it to her roommates or her friends," Dvorak said. "How could he have known it about her? And it meant everything she did was consensual.

"We did not have enough to go forward. And she accepted it, and her family accepted it. They recognized we didn't have enough to meet our burden of proof."

But the state's burden of proof -- beyond a reasonable doubt -- is higher than the standard for the university's disciplinary investigation, which is a "preponderance of the evidence" standard, meaning it is more likely to be true than not.

Citing federal privacy laws, the university would not confirm if the male student was dismissed from school or if he left voluntarily. His last day of enrollment was April 29, 2009, four months before his arrest.

University spokesman Dennis Brown said he did not know why the man was arrested on campus when he was no longer a student.

In April of this year, a judge granted the man's request for an expungement, which deleted the file from all county records, effectively clearing his name and erasing it from the public record.

Burden of proof

"We're looking at crimes to be charged," Dvorak said. "(A university) is looking at whether to keep that person in school or not. ... We may have something we won't be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, but that would not necessarily mean, with the civil burden much lower, that they could not go forward and find him responsible and take whatever action necessary."

Notre Dame would not disclose whether the man was ever disciplined by the university.

"There are situations where women were raped and can't identify the rapist, or they were raped but so intoxicated they can't contribute very much to what occurred or how it happened," Dvorak said. "Those are cases where you can't prove it (beyond a reasonable doubt). Doesn't mean it didn't happen."

Prosecutors also face difficulties when a victim becomes uncooperative. If that happens, the criminal investigation usually stalls, Dvorak said.

Under Notre Dame's new campus policies, the university is required to conduct a full investigation, with or without the victim's cooperation.

"The dilemma, I think, that Notre Dame is going to be at," Dvorak said, "is how do they compel him or her (an alleged victim) to move forward with a civil proceeding when maybe that person doesn't want to?"